Murderer
by Lucillia
Summary: The story of a Murderer as told by four people.


As I watch the police cars drive away, a weight is lifted off my chest. I have finally told the secret I have been holding in for almost half my life. I told the secret once before, long ago, and it cost me my best friend. Today, that secret has cost me my father, and I am strangely relieved. I think my father has been dead to me for a long time, I've just refused to admit it.

It happened when I was eleven.

I was raised believing that my cousin was a freak who deserved to be starved and treated like a slave. I was encouraged to harm and otherwise torment my cousin at every opportunity and was rewarded every time I did so.

I was treated like a pampered little prince, as my parents catered to my every whim. My cousin however, was both Cinderella and the Whipping Boy.

Unlike in fairy tails however, he never got his happy ending.

Shortly before my cousin's eleventh birthday - he was about a month younger than I was - the letters started to arrive. That was when my family and my world started to fall apart. While I could and for some time did blame the wizards who sent the letters that destroyed my world, the truth is it was my parents' fault.

The day the first letter arrived, my parents denied me something I wanted for the first time ever which in itself was extremely odd. Their behavior grew even more erratic from there as more and more letters arrived, finally culminating in That Day.

Following the most miserable road trip I ever experienced, my father decided to mollify me by allowing me to help him pick out the new shotgun he was going to buy.

I should have known something was wrong when my mother didn't let me get in the boat, telling me that my dad and "the freak" were going to go check out the cabin they had rented first. I should have known something was wrong long before then, but I was a very stupid child.

After waiting for what seemed like forever in some grubby little pub, my father returned. My cousin was gone, and so was the rifle.

I told Piers about this during my first year at Smeltings. I had been laughing when I did, and telling him how neat it was that my dad had let me help him pick out the gun he shot my cousin with. The look of fear in his eyes before he stopped talking to me forever, and the way he fled at the very sight of me, insisting that he be allowed to sleep in the nurse's office instead of our dorm before he changed schools a week later was the first thing that alerted me to the fact that something might have been wrong with what my father had done.

As I said before, I was a stupid child and back then and I didn't understand. Piers was apparently a little brighter than me, because he understood what I could not. My father was a monster, and my cousin's murder wasn't a cool adventure. Both of my parents were monsters. What they had done had not only destroyed Harry who had done nothing to earn their wrath, but it had destroyed my childhood and Piers' as well. Piers was never the same after he learned that his best friend's father was a murderer who had kept a child locked in a cupboard and starved him and made him work like a slave before he killed him. While Piers was a bully who would happily pick on wierdos and small children, there were lines even he wouldn't cross.

It was as I grew up and began to see the real world rather than the sick and twisted one my parents had raised me in that I began to understand how horrific my cousin's murder was and how evil my parents were.

Finally, after years of silence I found the courage to once more tell the secret that took away my best friend and destroyed my childhood. This time I didn't laugh. This time I wasn't proud of helping my father pick out the gun. This time I was an adult rather than an ignorant child who had been raised in a twisted fantasy world where people who abused and killed family members for being "different" were perfectly normal and acceptable.

&!&

I watch from the crowd as one of my neighbors was led away in handcuffs. I had been drawn here by the flashing lights of the Police cars. The large man whose name I think might be Dursley, but I am not certain as I have lived here for only a few weeks, screams that he is innocent. The people around me seem to think otherwise, and that this day has come far too late. I ask my neighbor who lives in #13 what's going on.

"You're new to the neighborhood, so you probably haven't heard about Harry." the brown haired woman whose name I can't remember said.

"Who's Harry?" I asked. Several people around me shake their heads and say something along the lines of "Poor boy" and "If only we'd seen it sooner."

"He was the Dursley's nephew, Petunia's sister's son. _They_ said that he ran away when they went on holiday, and for a while we believed them. Then, the Polkiss boy came home from Smeltings extremely shaken and suffering from terrible nightmares and absolutely refused to go anywhere near the Dursleys despite the fact that their son Dudley had been his best friend since they were toddlers." Mrs. #13 replied.

"Oh?" I said, not sure how I should respond.

"Then the stories started. How the teacher who had been arrested for assaulting the Dursleys' son had been gathering evidence that their nephew Harry had been abused to give to the police. How a Social Worker who had actually visited the Dursley home had been mysteriously forced to retire early for "health reasons". How the Dursleys never reported their nephew missing. How Petunia's good-for-nothing drug addict sister Lily and her husband James Potter didn't have any criminal records, and that the only negative contact they had with the police was when they were found murdered in the home in the West country that had been in the Potter family for centuries rather than the tenement flat that Petunia claimed that they had lived in and had been nowhere near alcohol or a car on the night they died despite Petunia's claims that they had been killed in a car crash and had killed the "poor respectable family man who had three children" who had supposedly been in the other car. How the Dursleys had been spending money that the Potters had left behind for their son's care on themselves and giving Harry clothes that their son had ruined." Mrs. #13 continued.

"Why weren't they arrested before now?" I asked horrified.

"There wasn't enough evidence." Mrs. #13 said. "All we had were rumors. We knew they were guilty for years, but the police couldn't arrest the Dursleys on "hearsay". Their son Dudley finally came forward, and a file they recently found that had been "misplaced" in a storage room by one of Dursley's classmates who had gotten a job in the Child Welfare department corroborated his story. Apparently what happened was that Harry had had a spot reserved for him at the boarding school his parents had attended since shortly after he was born. Since the tuition had already been paid in advance by his father, the school was rather persistent in trying to contact him. Knowing that it would be highly suspicious if they rejected a respectable boarding school with the tuition paid in advance in favor of the local high school, the Dursleys began to panic, as the teachers at said boarding school would be outside of the Dursleys' sphere of influence, they would be able to promptly report any abuse they noticed to the proper authorities without fear of reprisal. They decided to kill the boy, and pretended to go on a spur of the moment holiday that they couldn't leave their nephew out of due to a lack of baby sitters. When they came home, they told everyone that Harry ran away and that they couldn't find him despite the fact that they spent three days searching. They had built up a reputation for the boy, making it seem as if Harry was an insane, lying, troublemaker so that if he ever died in their care, it wouldn't be too suspicious if he "ran away". Unfortunately, we all bought it hook line and sinker and allowed those bastards to get away with murder for years."

As I watched the massive man get shoved in the back of the police car, I thought it was a pity that the Death Penalty had been abolished and said as much. Several people agreed with me.

&!&

I don't know why I ended up here. I swore never to return on that day. Maybe it is because now that Voldemort has finally died, I want closure in other areas of my life. It is fortunate that I chose to disillusion myself, considering the fact that the loud commotion I somehow managed to apparate into was over the fact that Uncle Vernon was being arrested for my murder.

Had Professor Snape not made a small clock like the one the Weasleys had for me and put a tracking charm on me when I was a baby, I would be dead now.

The day before I turned eleven, my Uncle Vernon - clearly driven insane by the flurry of letters the school stupidly sent out instead of sending a representative to inquire why my first letter had not been read - took me to the sea for the first time. It is because of that first trip to the sea that I absolutely hate the sea and do anything I can to stay away from it.

He claimed that he had rented the small shack that had been on a large rock that could barely be seen in the distance and that the boat he hired had been to take us to it.

I immediately knew something was up when Aunt Petunia prevented Dudley from entering the boat.

When the boat was a short distance from the rock and on the far side from the shore, my suspicions about the long, narrow package that Uncle Vernon had brought aboard had been confirmed.

I leapt from the boat, not caring that I couldn't swim. Uncle Vernon fired the first shot while I was in mid-air. Fortunately it went wide.

The second shot he fired, while I was sinking toward the bottom of the sea hit me, but miraculously missed anything vital.

Before he could reload and fire again, Professor Snape had directly apparated to my location, grabbed me and somehow managed to apparate away despite the fact that we were under water.

Headmaster ass...er Dumbledore somehow managed to find evidence that had my godfather cleared of any wrongdoing in the deaths of my parents and those of some muggles who unfortunately happened to have been bombed by a rogue group that supported the IRA at a really inconvenient time and got him freed from Azkaban when he wised up to the fact that Blood Wards weren't worth shit if the people who were supposed to be powering them were willing to shoot the person who was supposed to be protected by them.

&!&

It's funny really. I half expected to end up here for a long time, but not for something I haven't done.

I know for a fact that I didn't kill the boy. Had I succeeded that day, I would not have gotten that letter from the head freak telling me that the protection he had given my family was revoked. That, and the fact that angry freaks didn't storm my home and turn me and my family into something that would only be distinguishable from hamburger meat only by the fact that it wasn't beef proved that the boy had somehow survived being shot and drowned.

Petunia tried to defend me, but in the face of the overwhelming evidence - namely the evidence of abuse including pictures that had mysteriously been found to have been collecting dust in both a storage room at children's services and the personal papers of a retired social worker who had passed away shortly before the trial, the fact that there were no official records of the boy in our world after the age of eleven and that nobody could or (in the case of "muggles" who were related to the freaks he went to school with) would say that they had seen him after his eleventh birthday, and my son's damning testimony as well as a gun store receipt with my signature from a small seaside town in the middle of nowhere - it did little to help.

I will serve my sentence with little complaint, however seemingly unjust it is though. The truth is, I am a murderer. The proof of that lies buried in the foundation of the Science building at Smeltings that was constructed during my final year there. No matter how many times I try to tell myself it was an accident, I know the truth. I am a danger to society and always will be, I proved that to myself and others the day I decided to kill another child in cold blood, the fact that I failed is immaterial.

Strangely enough, it wasn't the killing of the annoying little firstie - the memory of the look of stunned surprise before he dropped to the ground after I cracked his head open with a cricket bat for tattling on me barely fazed me - or the attempted killing of my nephew that ended up changing me and making me accept my fate. It was the look in my son's eyes before he turned away from me for the last time, denying me as a father. It was the day my son showed the world he'd rather commit suicide than be my child for a moment longer.

The drug addict in the cell next to mine who was arrested for possession with intent to distribute has a terminally ill child who will quite likely die long before his father is released in a couple of years. Maybe a little information will go a long way towards paying my debt to society and allow two sets of parents to say goodbye to their children as I cannot.


End file.
